


it wasn't love at first sight

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Episode: s02e19 The Dirty Half Dozen, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, oneshot with additions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-09-11
Packaged: 2018-05-15 06:31:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5775259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last person Jemma wants to see walk into her cell is her soulmate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She stands as she has every time she’s heard the door open. She won’t be caught lying down or sitting or resting on her laurels. She’s been imprisoned, but she hasn’t been defeated yet.

And there’s still hope. More likely than not it will be Gonzales or Weaver or Bobbi coming down to question her again, but it could be May. She hopes it’s May.

When the barrier becomes transparent, it’s not any of them. Her foot lifts to take a step towards him. She overcompensates and stumbles back nearly into the wall.

“Hey, baby,” Ward says. “Mind some company?”

“Shut. Up,” Bobbi grinds out. So she is here. Jemma missed her - missed all of the guards escorting Ward and the cuffs around his wrists and ankles, which are being removed now.

He twists his hands once he’s free and that must be on purpose, done to give her a glimpse of the mark on his forearm. She fists her hand, tightening the muscles beneath the matching mark on her own arm.

“I’m sorry about this,” Bobbi says and Jemma imagines she might look as apologetic as she sounds, but she really can’t take her eyes off of Ward.

As such, she doesn’t miss his smile when he says, “I’m not.”

She hasn’t shown any remorse. Not when Weaver confronted her about her deception. Not when she was handcuffed in her very own lab and marched past the whole of the science department _she_ rebuilt. Not even when they forced her in here, into the cell that has been used to hold some of the worst HYDRA has to offer.

But if she’s ever going to beg, it would be now. The words are right there, caught in her throat so she feels like she’s choking on them. It’s been bad enough with the memory of him down here. It’s impossible not to think about him while in the place he spent so many months, the place she saved his life on multiple occasions. To have him _actually here_ … she thinks it might kill her.

Her pride is stronger than her common sense, it seems. While she’s drowning under the weight of his very presence, the barrier is being opened to allow him through.

She practically throws herself at the wall, but he stops just inside the barrier to turn back. The smile he wore for her is gone, replaced with the more familiar cold fury.

“You wanna stop pointing that gun at my soulmate?” he demands.

Jemma follows the direction of his words just in time to see there’s an open square in the barrier before it’s shut. The guard just beyond it lowers his gun. They were threatening her to be certain he’d cooperate. She wants to laugh, but if she does she thinks she’ll cry.

“It won’t be long,” Bobbi says gently. “Just until Gonzales and Coulson work things out. If he tries anything…”

The relief that Coulson has returned (or should it be worry? Obviously he hasn’t retaken the Playground with the secret, powered army Gonzales seems to suspect is lurking in some hidden bunker) only lasts a moment. It’s the kindness that does it. Ward tried the same thing after he was locked away here; tried to be kind, tried to be nice, tried to be _good_. Even if it had been true, it wouldn’t have made up for the things he’d done, and Bobbi’s attempt at the same now is even more cloying.

“Yes, I’m sure that’s why you’re locking me in with a monster, so you can save me from him.”

The pain that flashes across Bobbi’s face is almost worth the smirk Ward throws after her statement.

The barrier turns opaque, giving them the illusion of privacy.

While the sound of many footsteps echo from the stairs, Ward places his splayed hand against the barrier, cringing back when it sparks out at him. “There’s something I could’ve done without feeling again,” he mutters.

“So why do it?” She bites her tongue. What is she doing _talking_ to him? She’s spent the last ten months avoiding him - she went into _HYDRA_ of all places to get away from him - and now she’s freely engaging him in conversation? Has she been driven mad after only a few days of imprisonment? She always thought she would last at least a little longer.

She looks resolutely away in an attempt at rectifying her mistake, but she can feel him staring. It lasts so long she walks to the bed just for something to do.

He waits a whole ten seconds after she sits to ruin the silence. “You have no idea how many times I imagined this,” he says, his smile lecherous. “But in my head there were always less clothes.”

She keeps her spine straight and hopes the heat she can feel isn’t too obvious in her cheeks. “You don’t want me,” she reminds him. “There’s no point pretending.”

“Jemma-” he begins. The rest of his sentence is the three quick strides it takes to close the distance between them, and he punctuates it with a kiss.

It sends electricity through her, exactly like the first time they touched but a million times more. His hands cup her face, tip her head back to the proper angle. His lips move against hers, demanding more. And she would give it. One of her hands is already fisted in the front of his shirt, holding him to her and the other is dragging at the back of his neck. She doesn’t want this to end. But her eyes flutter open briefly along with her lips and she sees the dark shape of their shared soulmark on his forearm, remembers who this is and why this feels so good.

“No!” she yells. In a flurry of arms and legs she pushes him away and scrambles over the bed, putting it between them. “ _No_ ,” she says again, like she’s speaking to a misbehaving dog.

He doesn’t seem cowed. He grins and tips his head to one side, taking her in. “You sure you mean that?”

She’s shaking - with desire and disgust and adrenaline. She paces shortly to use up the worst of it and Ward, for once, does the decent thing and keeps his distance.

“You can’t say you didn’t enjoy it.” Naturally he can’t be _entirely_ decent.

She rolls her eyes. Of _course_ she enjoyed it, he’s her bloody soulmate. Kissing him is… There’s never going to be anything like kissing him. She stops to face him, approaches the problem he presents the way she would a tech who doesn’t quite grasp her hypothesis.

“That was our first kiss,” she says. “And that was _your_ decision.” He opens his mouth to try his hand at manipulating her, but she’s been saving up this hurt for ten long months and she’ll have her say. “You hid your mark from me. You told me you didn’t want me - that you wanted _Skye_. All of that would be more than enough for me to reject you if you were any sort of normal, sane man. But you’re not. You’re a murderer and a traitor. You killed good agents, kidnapped Skye - twice - irreparably injured Fitz, _threw me from the Bus_. You’re a monster and this-” she holds her arm between them- “may chain me to you but that doesn’t mean I have to accept it.”

Her breath seems loud in the ensuing silence and her shaking returns, this time from fear. Ward is a very dangerous man who she’s trapped with for the foreseeable future. Angering him, while cathartic, likely wasn’t her smartest move.

His anger, what she sees of it, doesn’t last long however. It passes swiftly, replaced by curiosity.

“How long have you been down here?” he asks.

The unexpected question throws her off balance and she answers truthfully - “A few days” - before she can think better of it.

“Why?” he presses. He’s begun pacing, keeping the distance between them steady but any movement is enough to frighten her.

She lifts her chin. “You,” she says coldly. “I’m the soulmate of a known traitor, it doesn’t exactly speak well to my character.”

Ward shakes his head. “No. Fitz said you gave him the Toolbox when he left and Coulson would’ve mentioned you being imprisoned to get me to come along. These people might not have trusted you, but they didn’t distrust you enough to lock you up from the start. What changed?”

“What do you mean ‘get you to come along’?” she asks, distracted by his phrasing. “You came with Coulson?”

He smiles proudly. “Recruited me back to the team himself. Said he couldn’t do it without me.”

Jemma feels faint. Have things really become _that_ dire?

“Now.” His voice darkens. “Why did they lock you up?”

She considers refusing to answer him but if he sees he can get under her skin with so simple a question - one he might, for all she knows, already know the answer to - she’ll have lost before she’s truly begun.

“The Toolbox,” she sighs. “I’d been-” she twists a hand through the air- “going along - or pretending to, at any rate. I knew Fitz would never forgive and would head straight for Coulson when released. If I appeared to be more in line with their way of thinking, they would be less suspicious of his departure and I could secret him the Toolbox to deliver to Coulson. When they realized my deception, it only proved what they’d always believed. That I’m not to be trusted.”

Before the Toolbox incident, she endured a very long, very trying interview - and this in addition to what she now knows to be Bobbi’s many attempts at broaching the subject - regarding her ignorance of Ward’s connection to her. Gonzales and his people find it difficult to believe she could live side-by-side with Ward for so long and never realize what he is to her. Even though she left that interview nominally joining their cause, it was clear no one _quite_ believed her. From some of his questions, she’s fairly certain Gonzales suspects she was HYDRA prior to the uprising and simply jumped ship when it was most convenient.

As if there was anything _convenient_ about being dropped to the bottom of the ocean.

“Well, if this is all they’ve got for you, you’re getting off better than me.” Ward sits on the bed, his back mostly to her and it calms her down some not to be directly in his sights.

“You think being in here with me is worse than being in here with _you_?”

He shoots a grin over his shoulder. “Never. But Coulson’s planning on erasing my memory once this is all over. He’ll set me up with a fake life, normal life.” He frowns. “Probably. We didn’t actually iron out those details. Could be he’s just gonna dump me, memory-less, on some corner and leave.”

“That’s …” More than he deserves, certainly, but the word on the tip of Jemma’s tongue is _terrible_. She swallows it back and checks the instinctive step she’s already taken towards him to offer comfort. From this new angle she can see he’s idly caressing the length of his soulmark in his lap.

“I think I’ll know I’ve already met you though. The bond’ll still be there, even if I don’t remember why.”

It will only be fair. She spent months fighting the bond, thinking it was only a crush born of physical attraction and her eagerness to meet her soulmate after the mark had finally appeared. She had no idea what she was feeling was the bond settling in, linking them inexorably together. Now he’ll get a taste of his own medicine, feel that same pull and longing and emptiness without knowing why.

It’s justice, so why doesn’t it satisfy her?

“So why come back?” she asks, sitting lightly on the very edge of the bed. “If you knew what he was planning, why come back at all?”

He scoots around the corner so they’re both sitting on the same side, but comes no farther than that. “You. You threw everything into rebuilding SHIELD and these idiots are threatening to tear it all down again. I wasn’t gonna let them undo your work.” He drags in a long breath. “And I wanted to see you. Even just for a few seconds.”

She wants to believe him. God, she wishes this was true and he really cared for her at all. But if she lets herself believe his lies, even for a few seconds, he’ll use that small advantage against her somehow. She can’t risk that.

“You love Skye,” she says, looking to her hands because she can’t face him while she says it, not now that her anger’s left her.

His breath hisses between his teeth. “I know what I said and did. I know it hurt you. I’ve never been great at doing what’s expected of me and-” he huffs out a laugh- “letting the universe decide who I was gonna be with wasn’t an option.”

She closes her eyes against the sting. It shouldn’t hurt. She’s known for a long time.

“I was an idiot,” he whispers, so close his breath rolls over her neck. He’s sneaky, doesn’t settle beside her on the mattress until after he’s spoken.

Annoying a move as it is, such an underhanded tactic is familiar coming from him and, after the changes of the last few days, she can’t help the fondness swelling in her chest. At least she can depend on him to be a prat.

“I didn’t see - didn’t _want_ to see - how amazing you are.”

Her head tips towards his voice, her body leans into his warmth. He’s certainly not playing fair.

“If I’m gonna lose everything, I want you to know you’re the only thing I regret. And that’s my fault. I take responsibility for that. I missed my chance - and I made you miss yours. Jemma, I-”

“Kiss me.” This will hurt her down the road, it might even hurt before the end of the day, but she wants it all the same. She wants to pretend her soulmate wants her, wants to enjoy, just once, the pleasure of his touch. Is that so wrong? “Now, please,” she says because he hasn’t yet.

And it _must_ be a bad decision because he smiles before he catches her mouth with his, but then there are his lips and his tongue, his hands and his skin. And they’re already on the bed. Once she slips the inch, it’s easy to let him take the mile.

 


	2. one year earlier

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SafelyCapricious prompted "shower" for my soulmates meme and I felt it would fit pretty well in this 'verse. As the title says this takes place a year prior to the last chapter and, as you can probably guess, is why the rating went up and the warnings became dubious. You can find a more detailed warning in the end notes but to avoid spoilers here I'll say only that there is some dub-con.

“Am I gonna die?” he asks dryly. He’s been sitting on this stupid stool with his shirt off for nearly a quarter hour and the lab is _cold_.

“Eventually,” Simmons says absently. She’s turned another page in that binder before she realizes what she said. “Oh! Sorry. No. No, you’re fine. Well - mostly.”

“Seriously?” Skye demands. Grant’s grateful. It’s not really in keeping with his cover to be so sharp with Simmons but damn does he want to be. He was exposed to an unknown chemical agent in that lab, he’d like to know the prognosis sometime before the exposure kills him.

“You’re fine!” Simmons says, finally getting her nose out of that damn binder. “The drug is meant to impact your soulbond, but it’s a failure.”

Grant stiffens. He knew the guys at the lab had said something about his soulmate, but he hadn’t thought it had anything to do with the _drug_. He’s suddenly and acutely aware of the false skin he wears over his left forearm to hide his mark. Everyone on the Bus knows about it thanks to that knife fight he got in back in Venezuela, but they don’t know what’s beneath it is the point - and he’d like to keep it that way.

“Affects the bond?” Fitz asks, dragging the binder over to his side of the lab bench. “How?” Even Grant understands his confusion; the soulbond is immutable. Tampering with it is like trying to move a rock not even god can move.

Simmons drags the binder right back. “It was meant to be a weapon of torture. The goal was to create a drug that would create a temporary physical bond from the spiritual one. So that even if a subject could withstand the torture themselves-”

“They wouldn’t want their soulmate feeling the same thing,” Grant supplies.

“Precisely,” Simmons says, looking pleased about it. When she starts flipping pages again, Grant rolls his shoulder, the one he took a boot to earlier. It hurts. A _lot_. But he’s the only one who seems to feel it.

“So it failed?” he prods, already knowing the answer.

“Yes, right here,” she says, pointing to a paragraph like he can see it from ten feet away. “They tried numerous experiments but while the subjects were-” her good mood evaporates and she swallows a note of disgust- “injured, their soulmates showed no signs of distress. Aside from being held against their will and experimented on, of course.” She throws Grant a blistering smile. “So you needn’t worry about your soulmate - or yourself. The drug should leave your system with no ill-effects.”

“Good.” He slips off the stool and grabs his shirt. “Thanks,” he adds before he has a chance to forget himself.

Skye shadows him out and Fitz starts talking to Simmons about the drug, but it’s Simmons’ faint smile - directed at the pages of that damn binder - that he can’t shake. Her crush is good, it ensures she doesn’t suspect him, but he hates it. He hates her smiles and her blushes and the way every single one sits on his heart long after he’s left her presence. So he’d really like to take some of his anger over the day’s mission out on the punching bag, but as he’s not willing to risk that the drug’s 100% ineffective, he heads upstairs.

He spends the afternoon writing up his report on the mission and quizzing Skye on proper formatting while his nerves slowly - agonizingly slowly - loosen and the adrenaline buzz in his skin fades. He’s almost forgotten all about the drug and soulmates, but then Simmons has to come up, still babbling about the whole thing with Fitz.

“I’m gonna catch an early shower,” he says to Skye. With six people sharing one bathroom, it’s normal for any one of them to suddenly decide they could use one solely because no one else is in there. She grins, glad to be rid of him finally, and hops over the back of the couch to interrupt the others’ science talk.

Grant sends them all a quick nod as he heads for his bunk. He grabs his soap and a change of clothes and is back out in under ten seconds. Which is exactly enough time to nearly run into Simmons.

“Oh!” she says, backing up a step. “Shower?” she asks.

“Yeah…” He wonders if she had the same idea. His cover would give her first crack at it, but his own annoyance holds back the offer.

“Try to go easy on your shoulder,” she says, looking to it as if she expects to see the bruising through his shirt.

In his surprise, a quick, “You weren’t going to…?” slips out before he can stop it.

“No. Bed for me. It’s been a long day.” She shakes her head while she says it and he almost thinks she’s using the motion to distract from her hands. Her right’s come up across her chest in what he can almost think is an idle motion, but her fingers brush her soulmark.

He swallows as his own turns suddenly oversensitive again. He tightens his grip on his bundle of clothes. “Finally some sense,” he says. His _cover_ says. Because his cover’s taken it upon himself to force Fitz and Simmons to stop their sciencing when they stay up so late they stop making sense even to each other.

Her eyes sharpen. “Your sleeping habits are just as bad as mine, Agent Ward, so get down off that high horse right now.”

He chuckles and she smiles and he-

He’s got a shower to take.

“Sleep well,” he says and moves past her.

The bathroom is tight, but any indoor plumbing is a luxury as far as Grant’s concerned. In no time at all he’s standing under the spray, letting the warm water fall over his aching muscles. He breathes deep, exhales the stress of the day. It falls away along with the dirt and grime from the mission. And then it moves up.

He jumps at the odd sensation, looking down to make sure the water’s still running off him the way it should be.

The muscles of his back loosen and some of the ache in his chest is gone. And then-

He grunts in surprise. If he hadn’t been looking, he would’ve thought someone just laid their hand on his chest.

He grabs the bar of soap and starts lathering up, eager to dispel the strange sensations in his skin. He washes them away and it works. By the time he’s moved from his chest to his arms, he’s convinced himself it was just nerves. He’s gotten used to attacking the punching bag after missions, not getting the chance today has just left him jittery, that’s all.

His hands hit the wall of the shower when the phantom touch returns, this time sliding over his hip and between his legs. That is _definitely_ not normal.

The hand slides back up and he tries to touch it, to see if it’s really there, but he feels nothing other than his own skin. And then the hand moves down again and he can’t help but follow it. He slides his thumb along the length of his hardening cock while the phantom hand makes a couple more swipes. He’s panting for air when it finally settles, finally ready to get to work, and at the same moment he can feel his teeth dragging at his lower lip.

That isn’t… that’s not possible. But even while he thinks it, he’s got this great mental image of Simmons worrying her lip while she works over a tough problem in the lab and he knows. The drug works, only in reverse. She’s not feeling what he feels, he’s feeling what she feels.

He rests his head against the cool wall. Water’s still sluicing down over his back and his hand’s still around his cock and whatever she’s doing to herself is having a really great effect on him, he’s barely even gotta touch himself the way she’s going.

He should stop her. He doesn’t have to tell her anything. He could just put it in his pants, walk out of here, and go ask for her help with his shoulder so she’ll stop. Simple as that. Only…

Only…

He slams his fist into the wall. He’s not sure which of them is taking advantage of the other here - it’s not like she knows she’s giving him a second-hand hand job and it’s not like he asked for one - but he can’t find it in him to want to stop it.

It’s that damn soulbond, he thinks as he takes up a steady rhythm to match hers. It’s been growing for months, no matter how he tries to fight it. Hell, today when those bastards dosed him with the drug and started talking shit about his soulmate he wanted-

It doesn’t matter what he wanted. He’d have dreamed of inflicting the same damage if they’d threatened any member of the team. Because it’s his _job_. Because no one touches what’s his.

He bites back a groan as her motions become more erratic and he fights to mirror them but he’s having trouble holding out. He opens his eyes, trying to get out of his own head, and sees his arm, taut from holding firm against the tile. The blank stretch of the photostatic veil hiding his soulmark seems to mock him. If he doesn’t want her, it says, then why the hell is he letting this happen?

He comes. Or maybe she does or they both do at the same time. Whatever happens, his whole body buzzes with it and the bathroom disappears for a moment, swallowed up by primal, physical bliss, and then he’s left panting against the wall.

He’s got the sense to turn off the water finally and stumbles out to clutch the sink. His reflection is blurred tans and blacks in the mirror and he’s glad. He isn’t sure he wants to see what’s in his eyes right now. He just grips the porcelain tight and wills himself to think of anything other than Jemma and how badly he wants to go to her, wrap her in his arms, and never ever leave.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Warning:** Grant has been exposed to a chemical that allows him to feel what Jemma does physically. She has no idea and neither does he until she begins masturbating, which Grant allows to continue without informing her.


End file.
